Tuesday, March 11, 2008

Oregon Academy of Family Physicians to Industry: Hands Off Our CME!

In the latest sign that physicians are taking control of their own medical education, the Oregon Academy of Family Physicians has announced that they will no longer accept any funding from the pharmaceutical industry. Read an excellent article covering this story in Eugene's newspaper, The Register-Guard, here.

The Academy will be holding its major annual CME meeting May 8-10, and you can read its brochure, along with its statement that it is "100% free of any pharmaceutical funding or support," here.

This is hard information to obtain. I know that the Massachusetts Psychiatric Society, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, and now the Oregon Academy of Family Physicians are in the industry-free CME club. There are many other instutions, such as Yale, Stanford, and Boston Med Center, that have banned various forms of industry gifting in their programs, but I believe they all still allow industry funding of CME.

Sheppard Pratt, a prominent psychiatric hospital just north of Baltimore, does not accept industry support for its monthly "Wednesdays at Sheppard Pratt" lecture series. This was discussed in the Boston Globe article of May 7, 2007: "'No' to drug money: Dr. Daniel J. Carlat wants to limit corporate sway over psychiatry." In a telephone call today, I confirmed that this is still the case. However, S-P has accepted and is willing to accept outside support for other accredited CME programs.

I propose a boycott, and defunding of these organizations. All doctors who feel they choose medications based on patient response, and minimization of side effects, and on nothing else, should take offense. They should leave these clinician bashing left wing influenced organizations. Start alternative organizations to compete. Let's see who gets more popular. I bet they relent after the 10th resignation.

I find it very interesting...this whole movement to ban pharma sales reps/funding from the office/CME. Implicitly the message seems to be pretty damning of doctors. I.e., we (doctors), when presented with small gifts (pens), free samples, or a free lunch will respond by harming our patients physically (if it results in Rxing the wrong drug) or financially (if it results in a more expensive drug than necessary). "We doctors are not very smart, and thus we must ban PHRMA from the interacting with us....they will just trick us!!!" seems to be the message. Seriously now, why is it so hard to take a Lipitor pen, to listen to the Pfizer rep over lunch, but once back in the exam room to write generic simva or Vytorin or whatever might be appropriate for that particular patient. Again, this whole movement seems a pretty damning statement on the discipline (lack of) of doctors. Drug companies are just acting like any capitalist would....your Canon sales rep is going to tell you he's better than Xerox, and your Mercedes guy is going to embellish the quality of his goods. Why when it comes to medicine, docs are so dumb that we need special rules to "protect" them from the big bad drug companies? I say this is a bunch of garbage....let the drug companies piss away their money on pens and sandwiches, and trust the docs to make decisions based solely on data. sorry for the long comment! -MTS

Doctor: "Why when it comes to medicine, docs are so dumb that we need special rules to "protect" them from the big bad drug companies?"

You seem puzzled.

Let me help.

You are on a web hate speech site. These left wing ideologues are no more amenable to debate with doctors than a KKK site would be with black folks. They know the truth, and no fact or logic can have the slightest influence on these haters.

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About Dr. Carlat

I am a psychiatrist in Newburyport, Massachusetts and an Associate Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at Tufts Medical School (but note that the opinions expressed in this blog are not those of Tufts). I graduated from the psychiatric residency at Massachusetts General Hospital in 1995, and am the founder and publisher of three CME newsletters, including The Carlat Psychiatry Report. In March 2012, I left the publishing world to work on conflict of interest issues for The Pew Charitable Trusts, as director of the Pew Prescription Project. I returned to Newburyport and Carlat Publishing in September 2014.